There’s no time to innovate – green tech innovation can’t save us from climate change Foley, Project Dradown Director, 24

The fundamental reason high-tech solutions won’t save us from climate change is simple: time. Time is by far the most important variable – and the one thing technology can’t give us more of. Climate change is a cumulative problem.

The warming we see now is caused by the year-by-year, decade-by-decade build-up of greenhouse gas pollution in Earth’s atmosphere. The severe climate disruptions of 2023 – the record temperatures, storms, fires and other disasters – weren’t caused by 2023’s emissions alone. Nor were they caused by those of 2022. They were caused by our long-term, cumulative emissions, building up over many, many years.

Over the past several decades we’ve been emitting a lot of greenhouse gases – tens of billions of tonnes each year, adding up to a staggering amount of pollution dumped into the atmosphere. The cumulative impact of that pollution has fundamentally changed our atmosphere and climate system.

The longer we keep emitting greenhouse gases, the more this pollution builds up in the atmosphere, and the more climate heating it causes. It’s a process that effectively locks in warmer temperatures on our planet for thousands of years to come. The only solution is to stop polluting as quickly (and as safely and equitably) as possible.

To avoid the worst outcomes of climate change, we need to start lowering our emissions immediately. By cutting emissions now, and continuing to cut them in each consecutive year, we can reduce the future impacts of climate change. Every tonne of greenhouse gases we don’t emit, starting today, will help reduce the amount of warming we’ll see. Every tonne matters. Every year matters.

Solutions today for saving tomorrow

That’s why we need to focus on the solutions we already have. Despite what some think, climate solutions are already here. In fact, today’s climate solutions are abundant, whether they’re achieving huge gains in efficiency, reducing food waste, deforestation, and other destructive processes, electrifying our homes and vehicles, plugging methane leaks in oil and gas, or switching to zero-carbon energy sources. My organisation, Drawdown, is the world’s leading resource for learning more.

Better yet, we should focus more attention on the fastest ‘emergency break’ climate solutions that have an immediate impact on the atmosphere, quickly helping drive down emissions.

The top such measures include stopping deforestation (which accounts for about 11 per cent of global emissions – more than the entire US economy), curbing methane emissions (which have a disproportionately fast impact on climate), and cutting energy, food and industrial waste as rapidly as possible.

These fast-acting climate solutions can buy us time for other tactics – building new power-generation systems, transmission lines, energy-efficient buildings and transportation infrastructure – to kick in.

The worst possible thing we can do is wait, hoping that a new, ‘better’ solution will arrive to solve the problem. Waiting means we continue to spew pollution into the atmosphere, locking in more warming. Waiting is the enemy of climate action.